Sunday Morning Workshop: Simulation-based DTA for the deployment of ITS

Sunday morning reporting, In the context of the “Simulation-Based Dynamic Traffic Assignment for the Deployment of Intelligent Transportation Systems” Alexander Paz, professor from University of Nevada, Las Vegas, along with some others experts inaugurated a full day of workshops at the Steigenberger Kurhaus Hotel in the Netherlands.

Alexander Paz guided us through Dynamic Traffic Assignment for modelling ITS applications. Starting by explaining the basics of Macroscopic, Mesoscopic and Microscopic models and assignment models used, he illustrated their differences in a very straightforward way. He explained the procedure to proceed in modelling from the macroscopic models to mesoscopic and finally to microscopic models, giving to us in that context the essence of Dynamic Traffic Assignment. The introduction of several open-source transport modelling applications and the focus to DynusT, was definitely a plus. And he did that in the best possible way: by gave solid examples and allowing the audience to interact lively with the application giving a step by step tutorial on how to use DynusT for modelling a network using the NESTA interface while the audience was allowed to access a server and “play” with the model!
Rather important, calibration methods and methods for detecting errors using advanced applications of DynusT were also presented and explained. Finally, a methodology for modelling and comparing ITS to the reference case completed this very intuitive workshop.

Stay tuned as during the days of the congress more blogs will be posted on some of the great (or “lekker” as the Dutch usually say!) subjects presented!